I wrote this blog post for Adaptive Path’s blog, but didn’t finish it until they’d stopped using it for posts like these.

Last year, I was responsible for hiring service design interns for Adaptive Path at Capital One. In my almost three years here, I’ve looked at a thousand resumes and interviewed dozens of entry- and mid-level service designers. Finding myself on this side of the table has been eye-opening — particularly when I see candidates shooting themselves in the foot.

Five or six years ago, before I had a job as a designer, I would look at the “People” sections of websites of firms like Adaptive Path and the LinkedIn profiles of the people who worked there, and while I saw that many of them had degrees in something like industrial or graphic design, some seemed to come from (what seemed to me at the time to be) totally random careers like teaching, or the performing arts. When it comes to the field of service design in particular, it can be even more confusing for new entrants to the field: there are almost no university programs in the U.S. where someone can study service design, even as an elective. How are all these journalists and chefs becoming service designers?

Now that I’ve interviewed so many new and aspiring service designers, I see people glossing over relevant parts of their career history in order to focus closely on more recent, more obviously “designerly” projects.

It’s easy for a hiring manager to look past this, generally. What’s hard to overlook, though, is when a candidate seems dishonest or tricky. Usually, this comes up when someone inflates some portion of their design experience to a huge degree.

This is a tough subject in the field of service design; most people, even many of the design leads at Adaptive Path, didn’t have a “service designer” title on their resume before working here. And unlike in some fields, it’s hard to make up a personal service design project by yourself to stick in your portfolio. I think this causes a lot of aspiring service designers to worry about whether their background is relevant enough — a feeling I can relate to personally.

For applicants who don’t have a strong service design or design strategy item on their resumes, it may feel like you have two options: either inflate a small scrap of strategic design work, or lean into your “non-traditional” background by talking about what you’ve done to understand and affect the services that you’ve been a stakeholder in.

Don’t inflate your design projects

It is better to describe what you learned as a telemarketer and how you could apply those skills to a job in service design than to pretend people won’t notice when you describe a two-day hackathon in terms like “back when I worked at IBM” or “when I was freelancing for Amazon.”

Here are some (anonymized) examples from my own experience as an interviewer. One applicant’s resume (and in-person conversations) made it seem like they had a full-time job with a local political organization while also a student. I was pretty impressed! It turned out to be a class project that all students in that course were assigned. My colleagues and I weren’t deterred by the applicant’s “non-traditional” work history from before they became interested in design; in fact, we saw it as a possible plus. Someone who pursues a “non-traditional” path might have the confidence and street smarts to be a savvy service designer in an always-changing corporate context, and likely has first-hand knowledge of being at the nexus of many complex services that don’t always work together in a “designed” way. However, the way the applicant phrased their very recent experience in such lofty terms was a faux pas to us, because it felt tricky. It was frustrating too, because we hoped to see how the applicant related their past work to what they’d recently learned about service design.

What should have been obvious to me, but only became clear once I was the one doing the hiring, is that interviewers want you to succeed. If you got an interview, it’s because someone thinks you have a high likelihood of being the right person to fill the (possibly urgent) empty spot on their team. Being specific and honest makes you memorable, and helps the employer see what is unique (and possibly valuable) about you. Career and life experience that seem “irrelevant” to you can usually be construed as a valuable contribution to the way you will perform on the job.

Nobody applying to an entry- or mid-level service design job is going to have eight years of experience in a service design role; evading the truth to try and cover up a prior career that you feel is “irrelevant” makes you look duplicitous at best and bad at interpreting reality at worst. Instead, celebrate your real past and how it brought you to a new career in service design. If you’re an otherwise good candidate, hiring managers will look for a reason to overlook the “irrelevant” things on your resume that you think you should hide. All you have to do is describe what you did do in a way that relates it to service design without being tricky. This isn’t always easy, but it’s worth the time and effort.

Lean into your unique experiences

One of our favorite candidates last year spent several months traveling around the world before grad school. The most common advice for someone looking to switch to design from another field would probably be to do a pro-bono design project or take intro classes on the side; however, this candidate explained what they learned and what personal skills and perspective they gained while traveling. They didn’t describe it as a vacation; they made their travel experience relevant by showing insight into how independence and quick thinking are important in an internal design consulting role.

Another applicant had studied ancient languages in undergrad and worked in high schools for many years. Rather than inflating their recent grad school experience and ignoring their previous career, they made a good case for why what they learned transitioning from teaching to managing teachers and improving the educational process could carry over to working as a service designer, and we bought it.

Of course, any applicant for an entry-level service design job needs to show some familiarity with service design methods and some experience applying those methods, whether in a formal design role or in a scrappier, more independent way.

One of our interns last year had been an anthropology major at college, and then worked as a florist for several years before starting grad school. She had a semester’s worth of good projects in her portfolio; but we were also interested in her work before grad school — because of how she described it. The way she described overhauling the floral shop’s business relationships with vendors really got our attention. She saw a need among the vendors that her floral shop worked with, and by changing her company’s internal processes, she improved other stakeholders’ service experience, and saved money and time for her company while improving vendor relations. By seeing a need and implementing new processes on her own, she was doing service design, even though that wasn’t her title.

What interviewers want to know is whether you’re suited to the role. For entry-level service designers, besides the necessary qualifications around communication skills and knowledge of design methods, hirers want to see that you think about systems and touchpoints and how both big-picture aspects and small details affect the human experience of all the people involved with a service. If you can identify the point in your career when you thought, “this is when I decided I was cut out for the service design career path” or “here’s how I learned I might be good at it,” you’re on your way to crafting a compelling argument for how your experience as a florist, high school teacher coach, or international backpacker makes you a unique and valuable addition to the team.

I wrote this article with Thomas Brandenburg’s help for the Service Design Network U.S. 2017 conference’s blog.

Mager and Evenson stand with the other conference organizers at the SDN Global Conference in 2014 in Stockholm.

The friendship of Shelley Evenson and Birgit Mager represents a collaboration that has sustained the field since its early days. Their work has been especially instrumental in the United States. Service design’s origins are in Europe, but early interest in the field across the Atlantic played a part in the development of the global Service Design Network. Though it only went on for only two years, the Emergence Conference in 2006 and 2007 marked the first service design conference in America, and was an important tipping point in the history of the field.

This year, the SDN hosts the first U.S. National Conference on service design. In an interview this summer, Evenson and Mager reflected on their work with the SDN, the Emergence conference, and the way the field of service design in general has grown since its early days in 2003.

“At that point I did not really grasp the significance of what was happening,” said Mager, reflecting on the first Emergence conference.

“I think it was really a starting point for a bigger movement, and gave me the confidence that [the field of service design] is not just the few of us, but that there is a huge interest. I cannot underestimate the confidence and awareness level [that the conference created].”

“I had been asked to teach a week-long course at the Interaction Design Institute at Ivrea,” said Evenson. “They wanted to learn about service design, which I really did not know anything about. We had been doing design strategy for a long time, and we would write product-slash-service, but we never really explored the service side. After this week it became clear I had to learn about service design. It was suggested to me that I contact Birgit.”

“I received an email from Shelley from Carnegie Mellon. I was not so sure what she wanted,” said Mager. “At the time, we were building the Service Design Network; we decided to go to Chicago to meet with a group of people. I thought, since Shelley is in the United States, she could come to Chicago. I was thrilled and amazed when she said yes.”

Said Evenson, “It’s funny, I do remember, I asked you for articles you had written, and you said they were in German. I said, send them anyway, and I put them into Google translate and made sense of it, which was remarkable!”

In Chicago, said Mager, “we had a good talk, good beer, and good jazz, and we made friends!”

“No matter what business you’re in, your business is the messy, human type.” So says Lea Simpson, a self-described “tech optimist” who works with big organizations to help make sense of the future and what to do about it. She’s worked with teams who are working to electrify rural clinics in Zimbabwe and connected rural schools in Nepal to the Internet via unused frequencies in the television broadcast spectrum.She’s also worked with some of the world’s biggest brands, including Nike and Warner Bros.

Working at the frontiers of technology, where stakeholders and environments don’t have the social, economic, or tech infrastructure of a Silicon Valley or a Seoul, Simpson has guided diverse teams toward important goals. Last year, she sat down to codify exactly what she’d seen among successful and unsuccessful innovation teams from her two-decade career.

Unlike architecture and graphic design, service and interaction design haven’t yet discovered a way to exist as both art and as something utilitarian. Sketches by Charles & Ray Eames, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Frank Lloyd Wright hang in museums; those drawings were stages in the design process for products, graphics, and buildings that still serve a practical purpose today.

The way that we sketch our concepts for apps, websites, and services in physical space reflects an emphasis on the utilitarian. In my field, the belief that interactions should be immediately comprehensible and nearly invisible is paramount, and the use of generic patterns is, for many projects, a best practice.

Sketching itself serves a utilitarian purpose for service designers and interaction designers: I use sketching to quickly test out ideas and develop new ideas as I go. Sketching even very common interaction design patterns for smartphone apps (for instance) can reveal new ideas for data visualizations or other interaction features. More often, though, making a quick sketch of an interface that seems simple in your mind can reveal fundamental flaws in the idea.

Sketching intangible services that don’t take place on a screen serves the same purpose. Service designers often like to depict future service designs as stories—primarily text with some illustrations. However, sketching the service in action helps me come up with new ideas for what I’m designing, and can help me realize I’m going down a crazy path.

Service design and interaction design are disciplines that may evolve radically before reaching a level of maturity to where, like architecture, their products can be appreciated in a utilitarian and aesthetic way simultaneously.

I’m continuing my high-level analysis with a look at which scenarios caused polarized reactions, and by segmenting the respondents based on the extreme scores they gave to different scenarios.

Polarizing scenarios

Some scenarios had a lot of agreement (most people gave the same score), whereas other scenarios split the population.

The 50th movie scenario was not very polarizing. Fifty-four out of 138 people (39% of the respondents) gave it a 3. Twenty-three percent of the 138 people gave it between 0-2, and 37% of the 138 people gave it between 4-6.

The prevailing attitudes regarding the movie theater scores scenario were that it’s creepy, and that it’s not enough (the employee doesn’t offer a free popcorn or ticket).

The Home Depot paint scenario has an interesting polarity graph as well:

Two scenarios had only 8 or 9 respondents that gave less than a 3. However, the answers ranging from “mediocre” (a 3) to positive (a 4-6) were split, with no one numerical answer receiving the majority of respondents.

The attitudes from the free-text responses show that the airport extra info scenario is overwhelmingly found as useful (69 respondents out of 135 said something to this effect), with 22 respondents indicating that this extra information is boring or not special in their opinions.

For the semi-frequent Starbucks guest, the respondents indicated that the personalized service (utilitarian service orientation) is useful (42 out of 116 said this) and that they like the personalization (49 out of 116 said this). Only 8 said it is creepy, compared to 53 out of 117 respondents on the hotel Starbucks.

A couple of scenarios were more polarizing. On these two, the crowd couldn’t make up its mind:

On the Target cereal sale scenario, respondents were split between saying it’s useful and creepy. Out of 154 respondents, 44 said it was useful, and 44 said it was creepy. (Ten people said both.) Additionally, 34 people said they liked the personalization aspect:

The hotel Starbucks scenario is especially interesting to me because it very much probes the limits of creepiness and corporate chain store behavior. It’s also useful to compare the data with the data from the similar scenario, where a semi-regular visits his local Starbucks. In that scenario, only 8 people found it creepy, with most people remarking positively on the usefulness and the personalization factors. In the hotel Starbucks scenario, 53 out of 117 responses mentioned the creepiness, with only 32 saying they liked the personalization, and only 22 finding it useful:

Interestingly, from the employee perspective, two scenarios didn’t get any scores below 3. That would be the hotel information scenario.

One surprise is that in the Target cereal sale scenario, 11 out of 44 respondents said that the scenario made them uncomfortable. (the creepiness factor.) That was the largest number of respondents who said an employee-POV scenario made them uncomfortable. The employee-POV scenario that was second-highest in terms of making respondents uncomfortable was the makeup brand scenario where the employee gives the customer a free sample of the item that goes with the products she already has at home.

What does it all mean?

I think that the fact that the variers so disliked the employee-POV local coffee shop scenario is a sign that the variers are a group of people that care a lot about the “human touch.” (I say this because the variers rated that scenario from the customer POV as a 4.2, same as the overall average. Therefore, I wouldn’t claim that the variers are upset by the creepiness factor; rather, they have a stronger affinity for “authenticity.”)

I think they may also be a more utilitarian group. I think on scenarios such as the 50th movie, they were more likely to give a low number (instead of a 3) because of the uselessness of the personalization. (Also see the next bullet for more on respondents’ reaction to utilitarian benefts.)

I think part of why the hotel Starbucks scenario fell flat is not only the creepiness factor, but also because the scenario didn’t emphasize the customer’s utilitarian service orientation. (The local Starbucks scenario did emphasize that, and many respondents mentioned the usefulness. In the hotel Starbucks scenario, Bob’s service orientation was not mentioned.) The fact that the respondents overwhelmingly gave it a 3 rather than a 0 or 1 makes me think that they found it more “useless” than “upsetting.”

People clearly like and feel comfortable with more information. (The Hotel Info and Airport Info scenarios were some of the most highly rated.) This fits in with my interviews and fall-semester research 100%.

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About me

I’m a service designer at Getaround in San Francisco.

Service designers are responsible for the research, design, and business strategy that goes into user experiences. My work is both theoretical and practical. I focus on the UX design, user research, and design strategy that together make a better user experience possible, across channels, within the context of business realities.